The Kelp Mole

©Howard Hall

by Howard Hall

   Most people become diving instructors because they love to dive and enjoy people. After two years, however, many instructors have had quite enough of both. Long hours, low pay, and the fear that some someday a student will hold his breath during ascent, no matter how many times you've explained the unpleasant effects Boyle's Law can have on lung tissue, all conspire to make used car sales seem an attractive vocation. I lasted longer than most.

I'd been diving for two years before I took an instructor training course in 1968. I was eighteen. An instructor-training course wasn't much in those days. You were asked to demonstrate an ability to swim, an aptitude for putting a regulator on a tank with the second stage on the proper side, and a talent for differentiating between a repetitive dive table and a Denny's menu. If you couldn't get all these things right, you were expected to brush up before teaching your first class. If you couldn't get any of these things right, you might have to teach your first class under the supervision of someone who got at least one out of three. To fail an instructor-training course in those days (at least the one I took) you had to have an IQ well below that of the most primitive mollusk. I passed my instructor training course with an almost perfect grade of A-. I would have done better if I'd known how to work the repetitive dive tables.

Ok, I'm exaggerating (except for the last two sentences which are quite true). But the above just helps explain how it was that Marty Snyderman and I became diving instructors. It was tough but not impossible.

I'd been teaching for four years when Marty walked into the dive shop where I was making big commissions selling snorkels and asked to see the owner. He pulled out his new, gold, master instructor certification card and was promptly hired as a manager and my new boss. A few evenings later, Marty and I went to La Jolla Cove (near San Diego, CA) to celebrate his spectacular ascension within the sport diving industry. We celebrated by making his forty-ninth open-water dive in the La Jolla Submarine Canyon. All but a few of his previous forty-eight dives had been accumulated during basic and instructor certification classes.

During the following years, Marty and I dived together frequently. We often shared dive master responsibilities aboard the local dive boat, Bottom Scratcher. And it was on one of these trips that we encountered the kelp mole.

It was a crisp and clear spring morning in Southern California that found Marty and I aboard the "Scratcher" at anchor near San Clemente Island. On deck, eighteen relatively novice sport divers were suiting up in their cold-water diving gear including two middle aged couples who had recently completed their certification class. Bill and Christa, Rodney and Janet. Upon finishing their course, they had blessed their local dive shop by purchasing every diving accessory the friendly sales staff offered including dry suits, Nikonos cameras and a super-eight movie camera. They had studied the function of each individual item thoroughly, but once assembled into a system hanging heavily on their bodies, they were divers without a clue.

After breakfast, Marty was quick to don his dive gear and disembark, leaving me to watch eighteen novice sport divers who were trying figure out what to do with all their stuff. An hour and a half later, Bill and Christa, Rodney and Janet were ready to enter the Pacific Ocean for their first dive. Watching them suit up, I could sense that this union with marine wilderness was going to be imperfect.

The group of four performed flawless giant-stride entries off the stern swim step. They were handed their accessory equipment, and began making an agonizingly slow surface swim to the bow. Upon reaching the anchor line, they took turns attempting descent. These attempts took approximately forty minutes and ended in a mixture of success and failure. Success because they could now celebrate their first dive-log entry as certified divers, and failure because they never actually managed to descend below six feet. Each diver did manage to submerge for short periods before bobbing helplessly to the surface, or before surfacing to see what was delaying the others. But they couldn't all manage submergence at the same time. Cameras were passed from hand to hand to facilitate deflation of dry suits and buoyancy compensators. I watched it all from a safely concealed position on the bow.

Forty minutes later, the group returned to the stern and, after a lengthy discussion to determine who last had the now missing super-eight camera, they climbed out of the water to log their first dive. Bill and Christa felt sufficiently exercised and decided to call it a day. Marty was on his third dive when Rodney and Janet made their next entry. With some trepidation, I watched them swim out to the kelp forest.

Rodney led the surface swim to the edge of the kelp forest with Janet in close pursuit. After a short dive-plan review on the surface, Rodney deflated his buoyancy compensator, then his dry suit, and made an ungraceful but effective surface dive. Janet repeated most of this procedure but left out the deflation of her drysuit. This omission precipitated a surface dive that was not only ungraceful but also hopelessly ineffective. She bent at the waist and raised her legs, which filled with great volumes of air. These inflated monoliths teetered for several moments high above the kelp before falling over sideways. The failure of her surface dive notwithstanding, Janet made every effort to stay with her buddy as he swam off through the forest of giant kelp fronds.

Fifteen minutes later, I heartily welcomed Marty back from his third dive. This meant that I was now off-duty and could make three dives with my still camera. I opened my dive gear bag and began assembling my equipment.

"What the hell is that!" I heard Marty say. I casually glanced up from my equipment and looked off in the direction Marty was pointing. One hundred yards away there was a large mound in the center of the kelp bed. The mound was approximately six feet in diameter and nearly two feet high. After watching it for a minute or so, you could see quite clearly that it was moving.

I once saw a gray whale moving through a kelp bed. As it raised its head beneath the kelp canopy to breath, it formed a mound very similar to what Marty and I were seeing. But I knew that this was no gray whale. In fact, I knew exactly what it was.

"Oh, that's Janet," I said. "You know, Rodney's wife." I went back to assembling my gear. As Marty continued to stare in amazement, a fin emerged from the rear of the mound, splashed a few times, and the mound moved forwards a couple of feet.

"What the hell's she doing?" Marty asked shaking his head slightly and squinting in the direction of the mound.

"Well, she's sport diving, I guess," I said. Another fin emerged and splashed. The mound moved forwards a bit more. Actually, I'd been watching Janet carefully since the beginning of her dive. She was a certified diver, so I didn't want to interfere until I was sure that she needed help. Since her head never came up, I was quite sure she wasn't in trouble. I was hoping she would figure out for herself why she wasn't able to get down. But she didn't seem to be catching on.

"You think she needs some help?" Marty asked.

"It probably wouldn't hurt. Why don't you swim over and help her get the air out of her suit. I'll keep watch here for a bit," I said.

Marty gave me a sarcastic look when he realized he'd been maneuvered into making the swim. He turned to complain, but saw that I didn't have my dive suit on yet. He was still partially dressed to dive. Seeing the logic of it, he grabbed his fins and mask and jumped in.

It took Marty about ninety seconds to make the surface swim to the edge of the kelp bed. Then he executed an efficient kelp crawl over the canopy to the kelp mound in the center. Just as he reached the mound, the fins emerged once again to flail the water in an effort to precipitate propulsion. Marty rolled over, got himself upright on the surface and made a grab for one of the flailing fins.

Marty prides himself on good hand-eye coordination. He once actually played semi-professional baseball. But the movement of the flailing fin seemed ungoverned by predictable Newtonian physics. Marty missed several grabs at the fin before it smacked him hard on the top of the head, partially flooding his mask. As he lifted his head to clear his mask, he was struck by a quick succession of blows that ended with a hard smack to the temple that knocked his mask around to the side of his head and dislodged one of his contact lenses.

Though his mask was dislodged and his vision impaired, Marty managed to get hold of one fin for a short time. But his frantic tugging was insufficient to gain Janet's attention. When the fin slipped loose, Marty retreated. He swam back to the boat with his mask in one hand and his other covering his eye with the dislodged contact lens. The kelp mole continued its slow progress through the kelp.

When Marty climbed back aboard the Bottom Scratcher, he found me quite incapacitated with laughter. Not amused, he stormed past me with his hand over one eye while using the other to navigate his way to the mirror in the starboard head. "You want to help her, you go!" he said over his shoulder. "I've had it".

By then I had my wet suit on and was quite ready to take the tag. But when I looked back to the kelp, Janet had completed her traverse of the kelp canopy and had emerged on the other side. Rodney had surfaced and they were beginning their swim back to the boat.

Marty had recovered his composure and returned to the stern by the time Janet and Rodney climbed aboard. Surprisingly, they seemed happy and full of enthusiasm for their dive. I looked over at Marty and we exchanged shrugs.

"Hi guys," I said as I logged them in. "How was your dive?"

"Oh, fabulous!" Janet said. "We saw Garibaldi, and kelpfish, and whole schools of other fish, and the kelp is so beautiful and..."

I listened in amazement to this litany of undersea wonders. "How deep did you go?" I interrupted. Janet stopped talking and thought for moment.

"Oh dear," she said looking rather sheepish. "I was so excited I forgot to look!"

Behind Janet I could see Marty trying to retain a burst of laughter. His face was turning red and his cheeks were puffed out. He was trying to hold his lips together with his fingers. I thought his face was going to explode.